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The challenge in today’s Make it Monday, is to do some ink blending on coloured cardstock.

It seemed simple but I did have to round file my first attempt. I used a sponge dauber that was too old and it started to crumble and leave streaks in my blending when I tried to use it.

This is my second attempt and while it is much better, the water mark forks that I stamped in the background look somewhat dirty, rather than just being a deeper tone of the paper. I thought about giving them a clear embossing finish but I had already removed the stamps from the Misti, so that wasn’t going to work. Hmm……………….maybe try again with white embossed birthday candles in the background.

I am afraid to look back and see how many Make it Mondays I have missed. For some unknown reason, I did not take any Papertrey Ink supplies down to Phoenix for the winter, so I could not participate in the challenges for the last three and one half months.

I didn’t want to miss out on this week’s challenge, but at first glance, I came up empty. When that happens, I really have to go through my stuff again with a “think outside the box” mentality (a cliche I know but it does work). Second time around, I saw the Wave stamp and it reminded me very much of the grafitti swirls that I see, so I picked that out. I put some of the painted words together to form a motto that might find itself on a graffiti wall. I used some Ombre inks and some embossing powder on the words to achieve the look shown in the video. To show the nature of graffiti being where it is not supposed to be, I made the swirl not quite fit into the rectangle mat. The patterned paper from Kaisercraft’s Basecoat provided the cement like mat. Another patterned paper from Basic Grey provided the colour scheme and again emphasized the graffiti look in the background.

I have so many things to do, I thought I would skip this week’s Make it Monday Challenge at Papertrey Ink, but when I saw the topic was photo ornaments, I had to participate. I have a brand new grandson to show off ( November 15), so of course, he had to go on the photo ornament.

The ornament is nothing special, but this little guy is the star of the show. I am thinking now that I need to go back through my photos and pick out a baby photo for each grandbaby and make an ornament for each. The most difficult part is finding photos that will fit within the frames that I have. Today, I used the scalloped oval die from Shakers and Sprinkles, but next time I will try using the Shaker Tree die if I can find photos that will work.

Just so you know…………….that is not baby spit up on my sweater. I was in such a hurry to get to the hospital, I slopped toothpaste all over myself. I dabbed it off, but unbeknownst to me, it dried back all white and gross looking again.

I have mentioned before that I enjoy doing challenges. Well today’s Make it Monday was particularly enticing to me as I had never tried stamping on a photo and I had just bought some new inks that should and did dry on a glossy surface. Yay! I was lucky because I have a little program on my computer that will make collages of my pictures. This allowed me to quickly resize my photo, frame it, add text and set down the elements any where I wanted on a 4 X 6 card. This left the room to do the stamping that I wanted to add. I used a sentiment from Joyful Christmas and images from Post and Parcel.

The stamps stick like Gorilla glue on glossy photo paper. I used all the magnets I had from three different stamp positioners and I still couldn’t keep the photo paper from flipping up to the lid with the stamps. I had to put a piece of acetate over the photo to line up the small ornaments as they steadfastly stuck to the glossy paper and would not adhere to the lid at all. This kind of begs the question, “Why do stamps sets come stuck on acetate instead of photo paper?” In fact I am going to try that out in the stamp sets that have tiny images that DO NOT stick to acetate once they have been inked once or twice. Maybe I can keep those tiny images from getting lost……………….yes, it worked ………………some tiny images that I had resorted to storing in a zip lock bag, stuck well to a piece of photo paper. Hmmm!

Now somebody is really trying to tell me something. The Make it Monday challenge has featured the use of a wreath for the last three weeks in a row. I have mentioned two things regarding this. The first is that I do not have any type of wreath stamp or die from Papertrey Ink and the second is that I like a challenge. But three weeks in a row, people…………………now that is a challenge.

Looking through my dies once again, while whispering the mantra, “what can I adapt?”, I came across the heart frame from Shakers and Sprinkles. Check, I will use that and somehow make it look Christmasy. I also didnt have any ribbon from Papertrey but found some holly ribbon from May Arts, that I thought would start to transform the wreath into a Christmas theme. A little bouquet of greenery from Spruce and Sprigs was an easy choice. Finally I found a little sentiment in Post & Parcel that would tie in Christmas with the heart shaped wreath.

The background is a 3D woodgrain embossing folder from Stampin Up that is just remarkable in its depth and detail. Voila! Done!

This week’s challenge at Papertrey Ink is to make a glittery mat for a card. I like it when these challenges remind me to take out a product that I haven’t used for a while. Lizzie used the white adhesive backed sheets from Papertrey Ink to make a glittered mat for her card. I think that I have only used these sheets to make stickers out of small stamps or dies so I wanted to see how they would work as a mat. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to make a card with a nice glittered edge. I would probably have dipped all four sides of the mat into the glitter and then attached it to the main image with glue or tape. Lizzie’s method of attaching the image to the mat first and then just glittering the edges worked quite well. I did have a small crises with the image wanting to go on slightly askew, but I managed to get it back off and straightened it up and reattached. While the paper is not heavy weight, it held up quite nicely, especially when I added foam tape to make the mat dimensional. I will definitely use this method in the future.

This week the challenge is to make a wreath. This is exactly the type of challenge that gets my creativity going, because I have no wreaths from Papertrey Ink. Nada….not one. That meant that I had to think outside the box…………er circle in this case. Tearing through every stamp set I had, I spotted a leaf spray from a Bleeding Heart stamp. It had a touch of a curve to it, so I thought I might be able to coax it into a circle shape. It is from the Make it Market Garden Gate kit. It came together very well, until that terrible moment, when I decided to add some dark brown splatters and black flower centers……………nope didn’t like it and had to start over. All is well, though, as the second time around I used a darker rust colour for the second layer of leaves and it turned out better. There really is something to be said for dress rehearsals. You do figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I didn’t start out to make this card. Truth be known I started out to clean toilets, but hey, I am easily distracted. I estimated that I could make a card in under an hour as I had made Z fold cards before. Ha Ha Ha. About an hour into the construction, I decided the background was too plain. I then decided to turn it into a watercolour card. Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. Somewhere along the way it kind of turned into a Papertrey Ink meets Heartfelt Creations kind of card. Yes, it is kind of odd, but I like it.

It seems that I haven’t posted anything for a long time. I have been posting but I traded posting on my blog for posting pictures of my trip to Europe on Facebook.

When I saw that the challenge was to make a slider card, I almost gave up before starting. I have always found slider cards to be quite challenging. Truth of the matter is, I am not much for measuring and slider cards call for careful measurements, if they are to work smoothly.

In the end I decided to go for it. I encountered a fair number of do overs in getting the card made. Everything from stamping on the tag instead of the bottom of the slider, to choosing too light and too heavy of a cardstock which caused issues. Finally, I decided to design a slider card template on my electronic cutter so that I could create slider cards of varying sizes more easily in the future.

This week’s Make it Monday at Papertrey Ink is calling for “make your own wreath”. I recently saw a card where light colours were used to make the base of some flowers and then slightly darker colours were layered on top. creating an ethereal looking card. That was the look I started out to achieve, but I ended up adding Nuvo drops to most of my darker layers as I thought the card was a bit dull. I did like the resulting card nevertheless, so here it is:

Interestingly, what I forgot was that the larger blue Nuvo drops are “glow in the dark”, which is a far cry from the soft ethereal look I was going for. I only remembered this when I took the card into my dark hallway to photograph the card. If you are looking for a product that “glows in the dark”, I can attest to the fact that these Nuvo drops do!